Toronoto, Ontario
Modular Office Lockers for a Growing Firm
See how this rapidly growing firm used modular office lockers to create a sleek, stylish work environment. Some lockers store refrigerated medications.
A Creative Work Environment
Talented creative teams are the key to this advertising agency’s success, so keeping employees engaged and inspired is one of the firm’s top priorities. When the time came to open a new office in Toronto, the firm’s leaders wanted to create an open work environment that would reflect their commitment to innovation and collaboration. They also wanted a flexible space that could accommodate additional team members as the company grew.
In order to meet these goals, the project design team created an open office concept over multiple floors of a downtown high-rise. Tall windows around the outer perimeter fill the space with natural light and inspiring city views. A mix of workstations and collaboration areas allows employees to choose the right work environment at any given moment.
Designing spaces to promote creative collaboration.
The Need for Personal Storage
In an open office, most employees don’t have assigned desks or offices. Instead, they choose different work environments that best suit their needs throughout a particular day. An employee might participate in video calls in a “phone booth” for an hour or two, then move to a casual meeting space to collaborate with colleagues, and then spend a few hours at a workstation or in the cafe.
While this design model fosters creative collaboration, it can result in a lack of personal storage space. Without permanently assigned desks or offices, employees need a place to store personal electronics, gym bags, and other items. Some employees also need secure storage for insulin and other medications that need to be refrigerated.
Lockers for Refrigerated Medications
Some of the firm’s employees needed space to store insulin and other medications that require refrigeration. Special perforated lockers were specified to provide privacy and security, along with ventilation for small refrigeration units. These lockers were sized and painted to fit in seamlessly with other modular office lockers, and they’re conveniently located near the cafe and kitchen areas.
Modular office lockers are reconfigurable and provide room to grow.
A Modular Approach
Rather than designing banks of uniform locker sizes, the design team worked with the local Spacesaver distributor to design lockers in a variety of sizes that could be mixed and matched. That’s because day use lockers were a relatively new concept for the firm and the design team wasn’t sure how employees would prefer to use them. They thought it would be a good idea to provide a mix of locker opening sizes on each floor, but they also wanted to keep things flexible in case a particular layout was underutilized.
After the lockers had been installed and used for a few weeks, they found that the employees actually preferred layouts in which all locker openings were the same size. They decided to move certain columns of lockers in order to have uniform sizes on each floor.
Larger lockers were placed on floors where fewer employees worked, and there was still space to add additional columns of lockers in the future. The end result is an aesthetically pleasing personal storage system that provides security and room to grow.
